Why don’t you get back into bed? The next few years — the rest of this century — are not going to be pretty. There is an obvious disconnect between any remaining political ambition to fix climate change and the dreary reality of rising temperatures and melting ice. The grim physics of warming means that the next 30 years of warming is already locked, loaded and about to be fired.

“If the future is not green, there is no future. If the future is not you, there is no future”. Emma Thompson’s stirring words to the climate marchers in London last Sunday are worth considering in the aftermath of the National Party’s stroll to victory in the election.

Consider this. A few hundred metres away, right in front of you, there’s a man with a very big gun — a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world. You’re looking down the barrel. He’s just pulled the trigger, and a bullet is speeding towards you. You would very much like to dodge the bullet, but your fate depends on the actions of the political parties standing for election on September the 20th.

Ten days ago a group of environmental NGOs launched the Climate Voter initiative — a non-partisan effort to put climate change firmly onto the election agenda. Over 18,000 people have already signed up.

As long as governments have a completely free hand, and are backed by vested interests with deep pockets, they’ll screw up carbon policy. They’ll do it at every opportunity. So let’s take some of the levers out of their hands, and give them to someone with a legislated requirement to act in the best interest of all New Zealanders.

We are committed to a watery future. The coastline we grew up with — the coastline that humanity grew up with — will soon be history. The giant ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland are melting fast, and have passed the point of no return. Substantial sea level rise is now unstoppable.

At the end of last week Generation Zero, a non-partisan group of young people formed to advocate for climate action, started a Vote New Energy campaign to put a clean energy transformation on the political agenda in the run up to the general election.

The simple truth is that we (as in the entire global community) have to adapt to the changes that are inevitable, and reduce emissions as fast as possible to prevent climate change going far beyond adaptive capacity and into the realms of real catastrophe.

The people of Christchurch — and the whole of New Zealand — need a better response to flooding than a prime minister gurning with a mop, because every coastal city and town in the country is going to face increasing inundation as sea levels rise and rainstorms get heavier.

All of these sources, from blogs like Watts Up With That in the US or Jo Nova in Australia, to the weighty tomes delivered by the NIPCC, exist purely as a support network for people and politicians who find confronting climate change an affront to their beliefs or to their pockets.